Virtual Machine Escape

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What Does Virtual Machine Escape Mean?

Virtual machine escape is a security exploit that enables a hacker/cracker to gain access to the primary hypervisor and its created virtual machines. Virtual machine escape enables a user to escape from the guest OS boundary created and managed by the hypervisor and gain access to the top tier virtualization layer.

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Techopedia Explains Virtual Machine Escape

Virtual machine escape is one of the security threats or exploits within a virtual machine or virtualization infrastructure. Typically, after escaping the guest virtual machine, the exploiter can execute code on the hypervisor or the host operating system. It will also have access to the primary hypervisor and can perform any administrative tasks such as virtual machine creation, deletion, resource quota modification and more. Moreover, the attacker can edit the privileges assigned to its specific virtual machine.

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Margaret Rouse
Technology expert
Margaret Rouse
Technology expert

Margaret is an award-winning writer and educator known for her ability to explain complex technical topics to a non-technical business audience. Over the past twenty years, her IT definitions have been published by Que in an encyclopedia of technology terms and cited in articles in the New York Times, Time Magazine, USA Today, ZDNet, PC Magazine, and Discovery Magazine. She joined Techopedia in 2011. Margaret’s idea of ​​a fun day is to help IT and business professionals to learn to speak each other’s highly specialized languages.